policywank » Florida Politics

Administrator — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 04:53:46 +0000

There was an interesting article at Salon.com a few days back about the Jewish vote in Florida. Picking Palin, especially, if the other choice was Liebermann, turns out to have been a really bad move for McCain in south Florida.

Crist on Climate Change

Administrator — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:51:18 +0000

Maybe I should devote a new category just to Charlie Crist. This guy cannot be doing very well with his own base at this point. The former arch conservative is taking yet another high profile issue and governing like a moderate Democrat. He reversed the decade long trend of trying to disenfranchise blacks and the poor, restoring my own brother’s voting rights in the process. A week ago, he hosted a two day summit on climate change, saying that the state is compelled to take dramatic action to address it, then signing a bunch of executive orders forcing a bunch of groups to reduce green house gas emissions. He’s working with the Democrats in the legislature to try to overcome majority Republican objections to laws that would really tackle this issue. Unlike the voting rights for felons issue, I can see how this issue might help him politically with general election audiences, but it could make him a pariah among the people whose votes and money he may need in a primary three years from now.

Either this guy has undergone a serious change of heart on some major issues over the last few years or he has some serious, clever long term political strategy in mind.

Bravo, Charlie Crist

Administrator — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 22:52:53 +0000

I thought (and wrote) last summer about the brilliant repositioning that Charlie Crist had taken to make himself a viable candidate for Governor of Florida. I’m starting to wonder now if it was more than just repositioning. Has this guy undergone some sort of moderate personal realignment after spending a few years in government? In his earliest runs for statewide office, Crist seemed to actively court the religious right. The few contacts I had that swam in the stream thought really favorably of him and told me that most people they knew with similar issue positions felt the same way. In his run for governor last year, Crist portrayed himself as a moderate, pragmatic, “get things done” kind of manager. He’d dropped any hint of being an ideologue.

This week, he restored voting rights to 950,000 felons in Florida, including my brother. I can see no benefit for the Republicans in this and only a glint of a benefit to Charlie Crist in this. I suppose if he’s looking to be a two term governor and then maybe a Senator someday (he ran before and got his ass handed to him by Bob Graham), then maybe these felons who might normally vote Democratic would have a soft spot for the guy who restored their voting rights. But at best that’s a marginal benefit for him. Felons with voting rights vote at even lower rates than everyone else.

What is up with this guy?

Never going back

Administrator — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 20:43:10 +0000

I should start a whole new category of posts about why I’m probably never headed back to Florida. I think there must be an enormous amount of phony liberalism in the northeast. It seems that the more immigration Florida gets from that part of the country, the more conservative it gets. Anyway, latest on my list of reasons not to go back is this.

Undervotes favor Democrats

Administrator — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 02:47:50 +0000

The Orlando Sentinel is posting that so-called undervotes, situations where a ballot was cast, but no vote recorded in some races on that ballot, systematically favored Democrats. In the race for the US House seat in Florida’s 13th district, a number of voters complained on election day that the cast votes in that race, but that the vote wasn’t reflected in the summary. Others claimed that the race didn’t even show up on their ballot. Democrat Christine Jennings lost the seat by 369 votes.

Crist

Administrator — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 21:56:11 +0000

I hate to say it, but Charlie Crist is running a brilliant populist ad campaign. He’s running as “Charlie Crist, The People’s Governor”. I mentioned several weeks ago that he was doing a great job in the GOP primary of rebranding himself. He used to be the darling of the christian right. In the primaries, with an eye to the general, he was branding himself as a pragmatic problem solver and touting his achievements as attorney general. He’s now using those achievements as the basis of a campaign where he talks about going after the insurance companies and some other seriously unpopular corporate bugaboos. It’s fucking brilliant. If Jim Davis doesn’t do something to heat up his own campaign, he’s gonna get his butt kicked. Crist is very astute at getting the pulse of Florida voters this year. If he ran the kind of campaign that GOP gubernatorial candidates have run (largely successfully) in the last 20 years in this state, he’d lose big this year.

Florida Primaries

Administrator — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 00:54:38 +0000

Well, it’s definitely going to be Charlie Crist on the Republican side for governor. From the earliest returns at 3 or 4 percent of total voters until now (at about 25%), Crist has pretty consistently held a two to one lead.

One the Democratic side, it’s still looking like Jim Davis is going to win it, but his lead narrowed in the polls this week and has been narrowing all night as the returns come in. He started off in the same nearly 2 to 1 position that Crist has held, but the gap has narrowed to about 10 points now.

JEB!’s heirs

Administrator — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 13:22:55 +0000

The Republican primary for governor is definitely the first one to start going ugly. Tom Gallagher has a commercial wherein he accuses Charlie Crist of being pro-choice, supporting civil unions for gays, supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants, and being in favor of some billion dollar spending plan that JEB! opposes. For republican primary voters in Florida, this is about the same as accusing Crist of being in NAMBLA.
Crist has fired back with an ad that talks about Gallagher’s distorting attacks on JEB! eight years ago in his previous run for governor. Crist has been serving as Attorney General under JEB!. Prior to the JEB! era, Crist had made a couple of failed attempts at running for statewide office as the darling of the religious right. He has tried to position himself in this race as a mainstream, pragmatic problem solver, focusing on his work as Attorney General. Crist hasn’t really done much in the way of attack ads on Gallagher, at least not on TV. He may be doing them by mail or some other venue where only Republicans can see them. The aforementioned ad simply has Crist talking into the camera about Gallagher’s history of attack politics.

Early in this race, Crist was the clear favorite. That was kind of surprise to me. Gallagher is a well known figure in the state who has run several statewide campaigns over the last 15 years. The race has pulled much tighter in recent weeks, proof that Gallagher’s attack ads are working. I imagine that Crist is going to have to respond in kind if he wants to stay in this thing. Crist’s TV advertising has mostly been aimed at the general election audience until this most recent ad. I’m sure he was hoping to avoid a bruising primary, but that’s not looking too likely now.

Good.

The Graham Effect

Administrator — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 15:19:22 +0000

A while ago, former U.S. Senator Bob Graham announced his support of Jim Davis in the Democratic primary for the shot to replace outgoing two term governor Jeb Bush. That alone was pretty big. Graham is probably the most popular politician in the state. He’s easily the most popular Democrat of the last 30 years and probably the second best retail politician we’ve produced in the last 50 years. This morning I saw a commercial that Graham has cut for Davis. Graham narrates the first half, is featured prominently with Davis while narrating and then talks directly into the camera. This is a really powerful ad and may just be what Davis needs to shore up the nomination.

Davis was once considered a shoe-in for the nomination. He was a strong enough candidate, on paper, that some other Democrats chose not to enter the race. State Senator Rod Smith quickly emerged as the not-Davis candidate and looked suprisingly strong. Polls showed the two of them in a neck and neck race with neither one beating Republican front runner Charlie Crist. Davis has started to pull away from Smith recently. He’s also pulling better against Crist. If Bob Graham is looking at Davis as the heir to his political machine and if he campaigns like that, Davis will end up winning this thing.

Sadly, I won’t live here to enjoy that. If Phil Angelides doesn’t get his act together, I may be leaving Florida just as the two term JEB! years are replaced by a Democrat in the governorship and moving to California just as Ahnold goes from being a political fluke to a two term governor of the largest state in the union.

More on the Republican race to succeed JEB! later.

Viva Fidel

Administrator — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 13:15:56 +0000

I have stayed quiet on the goings on in Cuba over the last few days. I’ve done so because the news coverage I’ve seen has been so far afield from reality that I didn’t quite know how to respond. It’s as if the whole media world had started drinking the same kool aid that keeps the Miami Cubans in their oddly excited and delusional state. Finally, I’ve seen an article that addresses things from a more realistic perspective. Given the sometimes delusionally neo-liberal tint of the Monitor, I’m almost surprised that it came from them, but their hard news is usually good. It’s more often the editorial pieces that are crazy from that rag.